Richemont, De Beers and Capitec made three of South Africa’s great family fortunes, and in September 2026 the Ruperts put Johann Rupert’s son one step below the chairman while the other two families said rather less.
The younger Anton Rupert, born in 1987, is a year older than Richemont.
His father, Johann Rupert, founded the group in 1988 by spinning off the international assets of the Rembrandt Group, the company built by the first Anton Rupert, Johann’s father. The grandson has spent his whole life alongside a business barely his junior. Since September 2026 he has been one of two men sitting directly beneath its chairman. South Africa has two other great fortunes that grew out of a single company: the Oppenheimers’ De Beers, which the family sold, and Capitec, the bank Michiel le Roux co-founded. Each is being handed on in its own way, and with very different amounts of paperwork on show.
The Rupert and Oppenheimer fortunes are counted by Forbes with “and family” after the patriarch’s name, which is the most candid phrase in the whole business of wealth estimates. They are priced against listed shares, so each carries the date Forbes last ran the numbers, and each sits inside partnerships, holding companies and family offices built to outlast any one generation. No individual heir’s share of any of them has been published.
$15.6bn
Forbes put Johann Rupert and family at that figure in real time on 3 November 2026, a little inside the world’s top 200. It reads as a single pile of money. It is better understood as a set of keys.
Richemont is the famous one, the luxury group whose houses the company calls its Maisons. Forbes also credits Johann Rupert with 7% of Remgro and 26% of Reinet. He chairs Remgro as well as Richemont, so one man holds the top chair at both of the family’s best-known companies. That detail matters more for succession than any estimate. A share can be left in a will. A chairmanship has to be handed over by a board.
Forbes lists him as 76, living in Cape Town, with three children. The family’s money runs through more than one vehicle, and one name keeps appearing in its paperwork: Compagnie Financière Rupert, where the younger Anton is listed as a Partner. How much of Richemont that partnership commands is a matter for the company’s own annual report, and it is the figure everyone wants and nobody quotes with confidence.
The arithmetic of a dynasty is simple enough. A fortune is priced every day and divided once.
The Rupert fortune has an unusually tidy history for one of its size. Rembrandt built it, Richemont carried it abroad, and Johann Rupert, who founded Richemont in 1988, chairs it today. Nothing in its record suggests a family in a hurry to change that arrangement, and the next section shows how slowly it moves when it does.
39 years
Richemont’s governance page describes him in four words, “South African, born 1987”, which makes him 39. It also records that he joined the board as a non-executive director in 2017 and became Co-Deputy Chairman on 9 September 2026. Nine years on the board before the title: the Ruperts do not rush their own.
The job is more specific than the title suggests. He co-chairs the Maisons’ Strategic Product and Communications Committee, which is where a luxury group decides what it makes and how it talks about it, and Bloomberg describes his remit as the group’s creative and commercial direction. He is also a non-executive director of Remgro. Add the partnership at Compagnie Financière Rupert and the younger Anton now sits inside each of the family’s three best-known structures, which is about as clear a signal as a discreet family sends.
Bloomberg read the promotion as a sign that long-awaited succession planning is underway. The phrase “long-awaited” is doing honest work there. Johann Rupert is 76, according to Forbes.
The appointment is also carefully hedged. He shares the title with Bram Schot, appointed deputy chairman in 2024, who continues as co-deputy. The Impression reported that Schot is 65 and that the appointment sets no timetable for a change at the top and does not make the younger Anton chief executive. So the second rung is shared between a Rupert and a seasoned outsider, which lets a board promote a son without anyone having to say the word successor.
Richemont has not said it, and neither should anyone else. What the board list shows is a man of 39 one step from the top, with his father still in the chair above him.
85 years
The Oppenheimers’ story is the Rupert one run in reverse. Ernest Oppenheimer founded Anglo American in 1917 and took control of De Beers in 1929, and Forbes records that the family held a controlling spot in diamonds for 85 years, until 2012.
Nicky Oppenheimer was the third generation of the family to run De Beers. He was deputy chairman of Anglo American from 1983 to 2001 and chaired De Beers from 1998 to 2012, and in 2001, Forbes notes, he took it private. A decade later he sold out. The deal was agreed in 2011 and completed in 2012, and Forbes records that he sold the family’s 40% of De Beers to Anglo American for $5.1bn in cash.
The word that matters there is cash. A family that had controlled the world’s best-known diamond business for most of a century exchanged it for something that could be counted, invested and divided. Diamonds are marketed as forever. The Oppenheimers’ holding in them was not.
What the sale hides is the change it made to the inheritance itself. An heir to De Beers would have inherited a company, its mines, its marketing and its board seats. An heir after 2012 inherits a portfolio and the people who run it. That is a different job, and the family built new machinery to do it.
$10.6bn
Forbes put Nicky Oppenheimer and family at that figure in real time on 31 October 2026. He is 81, Forbes says, and lives in Johannesburg. The fortune has a home of its own as well as a valuation.
Oppenheimer Generations was set up in 2018 as a single-family office to represent the interests of Nicky and his son, Jonathan. Nicky is its chairman. The money itself is invested through Stockdale Street, a London firm that looks after two branches of the dynasty: Nicky and Jonathan on one side, and on the other Nicky’s sister, Mary Slack, a daughter of Harry Oppenheimer, with her own daughters, a branch known inside the arrangement as the MOD family.
Here is a family that has thought about what happens when one line becomes two. Forbes’s estimate carries Nicky’s name. The London firm answers to both branches, which is the sort of detail that tells you the Oppenheimers learnt something in a century of running a company with a lot of shareholders.
A family office of this kind is built to make the next generation’s life less eventful than the last one’s. The day-to-day decisions sit with professionals; the family keeps the chairmanships. Nobody needs to be told what a chairman does. The Oppenheimers have simply decided that, after the diamonds, the most valuable thing they own is the structure.
1 child
Forbes lists Nicky Oppenheimer with one child. That child is Jonathan Oppenheimer, his only son, now 56 and educated at Christ Church, Oxford.
Jonathan learnt the family trade inside the family’s old companies. He worked as an executive at both Anglo American and De Beers before the sale, and he is now executive chairman of Oppenheimer Generations. In a family with a single son, succession is less a question of who than of when, and the family office has already given him the executive title while his father keeps the chair.
The line below him is a private matter, and it stays one. No adult Oppenheimer below Jonathan in a public role could be verified for this article. For anyone tracing where the Oppenheimer money goes next, that is a short family tree with one name on the next branch.
The contrast with the Ruperts is neat. One family has three children and one heir in public view; the other has one child and one heir, and has already handed him the executive role.
3 co-founders
Capitec has no dynasty behind it yet, which is the most interesting thing about it. Michiel le Roux co-founded the bank with Jannie Mouton and Riaan Stassen, and later served as its chief executive and then its chairman. His fortune is, in effect, a shareholding in a listed bank, and it rises and falls with Capitec’s price on the Johannesburg exchange.
That makes the le Roux money the hardest of the three to read as an inheritance. There is no family office with a published name, no heir on a board, no century of history to tell you how the family behaves when a generation turns. Mouton, his co-founder, holds his own stake through a family trust, which is the usual way such fortunes are made ready for the next generation, but no le Roux heir in a public role could be verified for this article.
His age could not be confirmed for this article. A fortune made in the founder’s own lifetime is still mostly the founder’s. When the Ruperts began, they too were three generations from where they are now.
3 children
The question everyone asks after the figures is who will inherit the Rupert fortune. Forbes lists Johann Rupert with three children, and only one of them holds public office in the family’s companies: the younger Anton Rupert, co-deputy chairman of Richemont, non-executive director of Remgro and Partner of Compagnie Financière Rupert. Johann remains chairman of Richemont and of Remgro, Richemont has named no successor to either chair, and its board has set no timetable for one. The shares will follow whatever the family’s partnerships and trusts provide. The chairs follow the boards, and for now the boards have placed exactly one Rupert of the next generation in line, one rank beneath his father.
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